Ask HN: What payment model should I adopt for my new site?

I strongly suggest either monthly billing with a thirty day trial or monthly billing with a single free plan which is not adequate for the core user of the app, but shows it will be adequate if they go to paid.<p>Single payments have much to irk you as a businessman four years from now. Trust me. :(

&#62;The first question is do users prefer to pay a one off fee &#62;(even though that fee could be quite large) or do they &#62;prefer to pay a set of smaller monthly fees?<p>Some prefer one off fee. Some prefer paying in installments. You should offer both if you can.<p>Monthly payments is better for long term cash flow management of your startup. But it comes with some admin hassle.<p>Single large payments are better for the short term growth of your startup. And it has no admin hassle.<p>So why not offer both?<p>3 month trial is a long time. Only offer such long duration trials if you know your service is very sticky but has a long learning curve. If the learning curve is short, don't offer more than 1 month trial. If your service is not sticky, don't offer a free trial at all. A demo will do.

The answer - it depends. Depends on the nature of the service, your demographics, your marketing and sales pitch and other factors. I understand you are hoping for a <i>discussion</i> here, but you aren't likely to get anything useful out of it even if it happens. Generic questions lead to generic answers.<p>Read around instead. There is a ton and a half of information on the subject including lots of personal and very specific accounts. Search HN to find them. Then see which applies to your case and go from there.

When we launched our commercial SaaS, we initially offered an annual payment only, but ended up adding monthly options in response to user requests. Students, in particular, wanted a monthly option, so you might want to keep in mind the age demographic of your users.<p>The monthly was priced so the annual provided a 17% discount. At first, the split was 1/3 annual and 2/3 monthly, but this migrated over the past year to the current 50-50 (we expect this to revert back to the 1/3-2/3 split once the schools fire back up).<p>In the meantime, we added two other offerings, one of which was a set of virtual goods that could be bought separately or as a bundle, and the other were add-ons that augment the basic desktop app. These are one time purchases.<p>The combination of offering both subscription based services and one off purchases has worked well, with each model generating 1/3 of our revenue (the other 1/3 comes from a mobile app).<p>We often see users tip their toes in to the water by buying one of the lower cost "one off" items, and then come back later to buy more and sign up for the subscription service. Having a low cost item for sale seems to provide a mechanism for the buyer to check out the process before committing to a larger and/or repeating purchase.

Totally depends on: a) what kind of product/service you are offering. b) who your target market is.<p>Some things I like to pay one-off for. Others I go monthly. I find the monthly services tend to update and add features more often than the one-offs. I also tend to see that the monthly subscription services provide ever increasing value to me. Maybe that is because they are "works in progress" in constant competition and know that should they fail they will start bleeding customers to the competition. Also, with one-offs I often find that the cost is high enough to make me seriously consider a purchase and I spend more time seeking out the competition.<p>Some examples: Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice or Google Docs. Outlook vs Thunderbird. Vimeo vs Youtube.<p>Oops... those examples all point towards free alternatives. Hope your product has some killer advantage that can overcome any existing competition that goes freemium. Else you better try the freemium model yourself. We live in an age where everyone wants everything for free.

go with monthly.<p>it's harder to convert, but whoever you do is going to stay a customer for a while. So you'll actually scale your business...instead of having to make a new sale every single day.

I offer both a monthly and yearly for a $9.99 p/m subscription. 24% of my customers pay yearly. The yearly comes with two months free to encourage customers in that direction.

Obviously it depends on what you're offering, but for a generic model i'd suggest a monthly freemium model - Max traction on launch with regular passive income in the future.